The difficulty in reading it comes from the ending though, in which Mieville succeeds in the denouement of turning the whole thrust of the novel up to that point into one ethical question with the sledgehammer impact of an emotional suckerpunch to the gut.

So many of us under the age of 50 knew that going into our first viewing of it, born as we were in the first post-PSYCHO wave does that make us Psycho Boomers? that it's almost impossible for us to fully appreciate the suckerpunch Hitch threw at audiences of the time.